Protego! British researchers recently reported in the British Medical Journal that emergency room visits dropped markedly on the weekends immediately following the release of the two most recent Harry Potter books (“The Order of the Phoenix” and “The Half-Blood Prince“). Apparently one of the study’s authors “conjured up the original idea” when he returned home from an especially slow on-call weekend to find his kids “petrified on the sofa” with a Potter book.

As the authors wrote:

Given the lack of horizontal velocity, height, wheels or sharp edges associated with this particular craze, we were interested to investigate the impact the Harry Potter books had on children’s traumatic injuries during the peak of their use.

As it turns out, the books appear to have had a huge effect. On the Harry Potter weekends, ER admission rates for musculoskeletal injuries in kids aged 7 to 15 were reduced by nearly half, leading the reserachers to conclud that:

It may therefore be hypothesized, that there is a place for a committee of safety-conscious, talented writers who could produce high-quality books for the purpose of injury prevention.

So there you have… If you want to keep your kids safe, make them sit on the couch and read instead of letting them go out to play.